It's hard to believe, but Mystic River is
Clint Eastwood's twenty-fourth feature film as a director. Since his debut behind the camera (he was also in front of it) in Play Misty For Me in 1971, he has directed more movies than either Martin Scorcese or Steven Spielberg. Some are memorable (Unforgiven), some are awful (Absolute Power), and at least one is equal parts each (A Perfect World; if you've seen it, you know which part is which). Mystic River is his most complex and assured
effort to date, a near-classic that falters due to an accretion of many
small flaws and one large one.

Adapted from the novel by Dennis Lehane, the film, released on video
this month, begins with three eleven-year-old boys in working-class
Boston: Sean, the good kid; Jimmy, the hard case; and Dave, the
unpopular kid trying desperately to fit in. The three boys are writing
their names in wet sidewalk cement one day when a car rolls up with two
men in it, apparently cops, who take the boys to task for their
vandalism. The men put Dave into the car, saying they are taking him to
his mother to tell her what he's done. But the men are not cops, and
they do not drive Dave to his mother. Rather, they lock him in a
basement and abuse him for four days until he escapes. When Dave returns
home, everyone recognizes him as "damaged goods." Flash ahead about a
quarter of a century. Sean (Kevin Bacon) is now a policeman; Jimmy (Sean
Penn) is an ex-con with a wife (Laura Linney) and three daughters; and
Dave (Tim Robbins) is still damaged goods, shambling through life with
the look of someone who knows that only bad things will ever happen to
him. After a late night of drinking, Robbins comes home to his wife
(Marcia Gay Harden) covered with someone else's blood, telling her that
he fought, and may have killed, a would-be mugger. The next day, the
body of Penn's beautiful 19-year-old daughter is found beaten and
murdered in a neighborhood park. Thus the three boys are brought
together again: Bacon working the case, Penn seeking vengeance, and
Robbins, whose behavior grows more and more erratic, gradually emerging
as the prime suspect.

The film unfolds as a crime epic in the mold of L.A. Confidential,
with Eastwood juggling characters and storylines masterfully. The
performances are generally strong (including a delightful uncredited
cameo as a liquor store owner by Eli Wallach, the "Ugly" to Clint's
"Good" way back when) and the themes--of grief and vengeance, love and
betrayal, and past acts that will forever haunt the present--are
powerful. But in the end, not powerful enough; or more
precisely, maybe too powerful for the film's own good.

As a director, Eastwood has a tendency toward heavy-handedness, particularly in films (e.g., Unforgiven)
and scenes that he believes to be Important. He over-solemnizes the
material, perhaps out of fear that he'll be considered just another
movie star moonlighting as a director. By and large, Eastwood restrains
this tendency
in Mystic River, but at crucial moments he can't help himself,
and the
portentousness creeps back in. Immediately following the opening scene
in which young Dave is abducted, we cut to Robbins, as the grown-up
Dave, walking down the same city block with his own son. Noticing the
spot on the sidewalk where the boys had written their names in the
cement he stops and stares. But rather than allow Robbins's face to
convey the feelings that the sight brings up in him, Eastwood
intervenes, flashing back to a shot of the abductors' car, with young
Dave in the backseat, pulling away down the block. I don't know whether
it's a lack of confidence in his audience or in himself that convinces
Eastwood we must be reminded of a scene that took place less than five
minutes before; either way, it's disheartening. A more serious stumble
occurs in the scene that won Sean Penn his Oscar. As the police examine
his daughter's body in the park, Penn breaks through a line of
patrolmen, howling like a wounded animal, "Is that my daughter in
there?" It is a raw, powerful moment, one that it would have been nice
to see unfold further. (What will happen when the rage leaves Penn's
body?) But Eastwood seems uncomfortable with this level of emotional
intensity, and so quickly extinguishes it with cheap sentiment: The
orchestra swells over Penn's cries, and we are treated to an aerial shot
of the girl's body that slowly pans upward toward heaven. It's not
subtle.

The script, by Brian Helgeland--who did such a
masterful job of carving L.A. Confidential out of James Ellroy's
sprawling,
impossible novel--also disappoints. This adaptation is a much more
faithful one, and not to Helgeland's credit. A silly storyline involving
Bacon's estranged wife, who calls his cell phone constantly but refuses
to speak, is whittled down to the point of meaninglessness but left in
the film nonetheless. Thoughts that Lehane places in his characters
minds, Helgeland transfers to their mouths, where they come out stilted
and absurd. ("What the hell am I going to tell him?" Bacon asks his
partner as they examine Penn's daughter. "Hey Jimmy, God said you owed
another marker and he came to collect?")

But the film's central flaw, where errors of direction, writing, and
acting intersect, is Robbins's character, Dave. The particular burden of
crime stories, at least those that are framed as mysteries, is that
their solutions must be neither obvious nor implausible. There are many
ways of accomplishing this, from the perfect crimes (and more perfect
detectives) of Agatha Christie and her heirs to the forensic expeditions
you can now find on television most nights. In Mystic River, the
narrative device that enables the mystery is the damaged, unfathomable
mind of Dave. Could he have shed his mild manners to brutally murder a
young girl? How else to explain the unpersuasive and ever-shifting lies
he tells about his actions the night of the murder? What did he do to
wind up covered in blood, and why?

Robbins, an actor who can carry himself with eerie, forceful
stillness, would seem the perfect casting for lost, haunted Dave. But
his Oscar for the role
notwithstanding, Robbins never quite finds the thread of the character.
He is by turns innocent and malevolent, timid and aggressive, naïve and
knowing. And while one can imagine these traits coexisting in a psyche
as fractured as Dave's, Robbins never shows us how they fit together.
The tough, clever Dave who bullies and outsmarts the police during his
interrogation ("He just kicked our asses in there," Bacon laments
afterward) comes out of nowhere, in part because the early glimmers of
anger and guile he shows in the novel are missing from the film. (In the
former, for instance, he characterizes his alleged mugger as "some
crackhead nigger psycho"; in the latter, it's cleaned up to "this guy.")
Helgeland also omits, except for one vague reference, Lehane's
disclosure that Dave has fantasized about molesting boys as he himself
was molested--a revelation with profound implications for why he does
what he does. And surely there are better ways of showing Dave's
internal torment than having him explain it to his son: "Sometimes the
man wasn't a man at all," he begins, before launching into what is
doubtless the most extended metaphor ever uttered by someone without an
MFA. "He was the boy, the boy who escaped from wolves, an animal of the
dusk, invisible, silent, living in a world the others never saw, a world
of fireflies, unseen except as a flare in the corner of your eye,
vanished by the time you turn your head toward it."

Because Dave never really coheres into a recognizable human being, he is laid bare as a plot device. He is the psycho ex machina.
(Annoyingly enough, he's not the only one in the film.) Why did he say
and do what he did? Because he's crazy. Case closed. Rather than resolve
the mystery by revealing the underlying logic of what has transpired,
the film declares that there was no underlying logic. Much of the
tragedy that took place
could have been avoided if poor, damaged Dave had behaved in a way that
made
even a modicum of sense. By untethering Dave from reality, Mystic River untethers itself, and ultimately floats away.

The Home Movies List: Five Oscars in Search of a Performance

Michael Caine (The Cider House Rules). Michael Caine has
appeared in more than 70 films and this may be among the least
convincing performances he's delivered in any of them. If he hadn't been
playing a doctor who performs abortions, would Hollywood have paid any
attention at all?

Kim Basinger (L.A. Confidential). There seems to be a
rule that in films featuring several standout performances the Oscar
nomination will go to the biggest star, regardless of merit. (This is
also how Tom Cruise was nominated for Magnolia, though in that
case they at least had the sense not to let him take home the hardware.)
And for the record: Kim Basinger does not look like Veronica Lake, and
does not look better than Veronica Lake.

Russell Crowe (Gladiator). Two and a half hours of
brooding punctuated by death. The most generous interpretation is that
the Academy felt bad for having stiffed him in L.A. Confidential and passed him over in The Insider. Or maybe they were afraid of being beaten up.

Al Pacino (Scent of a Woman). Thank God no one told
Pacino earlier that this was how to win an Oscar. If they had, his
entire career might have resembled the Tourettic output of the last
decade.

About the Author

Christopher Orr is a senior editor and the principal film critic at The Atlantic. He has written on movies for The New Republic, LA Weekly, Salon, and The New York Sun, and has worked as an editor for numerous publications.

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